age fell in love with the music of Mozart, Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky, which were played in his home on fragile 78-rpm records. At age 4 he began taking piano lessons. By age 16 he was starting to write music, mainly for chorus and organ, inspired by Gustav Holst, Flor Peeters and Paul Hindemith. A turning point in his musical life came in 1963 when he attended on scholarship the International Music Camp in the International Peace Garden on the North Dakota-Canada border. Amidst the intense musical environment, his performances at the piano, together with his then piano teacher Paul Lundquist, were noticed by Professor Earnest Harris, head of the piano department at Moorhead State College (later renamed Minnesota State University Moorhead). Harris, steeped in the pedagogic tradition of Theodor Leschetizky and Carl Czerny and a former pupil of Leonard Shure, gave him a full scholarship to study piano, culminating in his brilliant senior solo recital in Grand Forks the following spring, playing the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Early in his music education, St. Clair was enamored of the music of Edvard Grieg, from whose music he acquired a love for miniaturism and compact musical invention. Few of his works last longer than 15 minutes (with some noteworthy exceptions). He was also deeply moved by the music of Robert Schumann, especially the great C Major Fantasia, opus 17. In college, he became engrossed in the piano music of Mozart, Schubert, Schumann and Bartok, playing and absorbing their music over and over again on his Poole upright piano (which he tuned himself since he could not afford a professional piano tuner) in his dingy second-storey Cambridge apartment. This way he acquired a deep love for classical-romantic music, which is strongly present in his own compositions. In 1970 St. Clair made a solo piano appearance in a recital of his own music in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Reviewer Ned Brown made the following prophetic observations: We admired St. Cair's expansive genius, his dynamic keyboard skill and his personal modesty. At 24, Richard St. Clair is firmly launched on a musical career which offers great possibilities. St. Clair, following in his father's footsteps, began his studies at Harvard University in Cambridge (Massachusetts) where in 1969 he earned his Bachelor of Arts (A.B.) with honors in music composition, the first of many Harvard students to write a musical work in lieu of a thesis. While